Tom Snarsky is ubiquitous on the internet, andeverywhere he is he is sharing poems. On X and on Bluesky, this looks likescreenshots of books he’s reading. On Insta and Tik Tok, you can even sometimeshear Tom reading aloud the poems he loves. His latest collection, Reclaimed Water, is available fromOrnithopter Press. Kelly in Italics.
Tom, I've been enjoying your second book of poetry, Reclaimed Water. Here's apoem I really like from it:
Xenakis
Hovering, a jump
rope snaked through
stars, pattern mid-
skip changing like a
fortune, five four
three two one and
a kiss at the end.
I have a friend named Xenakis, and then there is the Greekcomposer it's a better bet you are referring to—though I'm not sure of that.Also, I'm intrigued by the echo of "Xenakis" and "snaked."But this is a thing I like about your poems. Your titles tease. I google them,I try to place them as fragments of quotations, I wonder about them sometimeslong long after I have read the poem... How do you approach titling your poems?How do you approach the titles of poems you read? I have heard one reader saythat he never reads the title until after he has read the poem. Do you titleyour poems before they are finished? For that matter, do you approach titlingyour collections in the same way you title your poems? If it's different, howis it different?
I’m soglad to hear you like “Xenakis”! It’s a poem I’m really fond of from RW; you know my perennial weakness forthe small poem. It’s also wonderful to be asked this question by you inparticular, since I love the titles in your chapbook Like Now (“Sousveillance”! “The Aminals”!). Re: titles, one thing Ishould admit right out is that most of my poems begin like this, arecently-started draft I’m pulling fresh from my Notes app:
Atitle, or an idea for one, and a little placeholder. Actually, to be moreprecise, most begin like this:
Somepoems stay with “Poem” as their title, and others end up with no title at all.Titling is often a space that feels ripe for fiddling with the fun kinds ofdistances that are the playthings of poetry, like in this poem by Noelle Kocot(that could be considered a blueprint for “Xenakis”):
LIGETI
The curse of the fathers. The
Good gift. Now you want to
Mess it all up. The orange
Orange. The movement of
Grace beneath you runs like
An Orphic vision. Your wild
Pulse, what does it affirm?
Ask by implication, ask by gesture.
Don’t touch me, I’m alive.
RaeArmantrout, who I’ve been reading a bunch lately, is really great at this too,cf. “Intercepts” in Eileen Myles’s marvelous Pathetic Literature. I love how, in Kocot’s poem, the title couldsuggest that the poem exists within a kind of aura or other association withLigeti’s music, or maybe it’s inviting us to fill Ligeti in as the poem’saddressee: Your wild / Pulse, what doesit affirm? I’m interested in titles that sit in this ambiguous limbo, forpoems and also for collections. One thing I especially like about deciding ontitles for whole books is that you can play, too, with how the title appears(or doesn’t) in the body of the text; Light-UpSwan had no such appearance, ReclaimedWater had a mildly oblique one (in the poem “Confusion Matrix”), and with A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poemsand a recently-finished book called MOUNTEBANKthe title has showed up more straightforwardly. To every thing there is aseason.
The internet knows that youcan't be around Tom Snarsky for very long without hearing the names of manymany poets. I admit that I follow you around and pick up names like a dog aftera sloppy eater. I'm interested in how you read. Do you use the library a lot?What's your favorite library? What's your favorite bookstore? Do you live in asmaller apartment so that you can buy more books? Do you read one bookfront-to-back and then start another, or do you have 13 books-in-progress atany one time? I know you take screenshots of poems, because you post multiplescreenshots every day! But do you use highlighters, sticky tabs, do you dog-earpages? What is it like to be in a house with Tom Snarsky and his books? (MaybeI should be interviewing Kristi instead. There's an idea — the indirectinterview.)
A beautiful question! Elsewhere I’vedescribed my reading habits as magpieish — lots and lots of stacks of books toflit between. Earlier tonight Kristi and I went to sit down for dinner and werealized, between cats on the chairs and books on the table, there was nowhereto eat. I think that’s the succinctest version of what it’s like!
I love used bookstores more than almostany other place in the world. We’re lucky to have a few near us, like WonderBook and Second Story Books, among many others, that offer books incrediblycheap — and Wonder Book also buys books back, which is essential for when thefiniteness of space reasserts itself, as it does. I should use the library alot more than I do (I did when I was near a college, which I haven’t been sincewe moved to VA), but in its stead I’m happy in the used-book stacks, wallet bedamned.
On the magpieishness, though, one thingthat feels important to mention is that I try to be that way with books I’vealready read, or know a little — for a book that is new to me, it feels a lotbetter to read it cover to cover, and then to return to it in that morescattershot manner once it’s in my bones. That, for me, is the only sustainableway to connect with the voice of abook, to keep it from dispersing into a sequence of disconnected images. Thereare so many things in the here and now that would tear our attention apart; apoetry collection, or some other thing made of paper & past (I’m readingPhilip Levine’s Don’t Ask just now),is like a flimsy bastion that can give us some practice in protecting ourattention as long as we find the time to let it. (I think of that scene inRilke’s novel that’s set in the library, where it’s just Malte and his poetspending the afternoon in a contemplation shared across time and space.)
I'm going to pull somewords out of your response. Sustainable. Dispersing. Disconnected. Attention.Flimsy. Bastion. I want to ask you a kind of tricky question, but I think thesewords might mean that the question is already on your mind. What is the soul ofpoetry? And I mean specifically notwhat is poetry and what is not and where is the line. I mean, what is it youlove when you love poetry? What does poetry do? For you? What does reading itdo? What does writing it do? How are the reading and the writing connected? Andwhat does attention have to do with it? Attention to what?
What is the soul of poetry? The soul of poetry, I think,is like any other soul -- it can be lost, it can be wayward, and if fortunesmiles upon it, it can be saved. Whatever it is, it is singular, like the soulsof Leibniz's monads or literature's nomads. What I love when I love poetry iswhat G. K. Chesterton calls, in quite a different context, its"thunderbolt" character -- like a literal thunderbolt it strikes youdirectly in the head & heart at once, since both need electricity to dotheir thing, but more metaphorically it descends down the Porphyrian tree ofparticularity all the way to the very bottom -- almost chancily, like a ball ina pachinko machine -- and gives you the sound of itself, to hear and to letresound in your own ear, its little bones. The poets I love most are sointensely themselves that reading them can sometimes feel like shaking the handof someone who has a joke buzzer hidden in their palm; there are resonances,and there is the rigidity of where you are as you read them, which thevibrations reveal to be too rigorous, too stiff, quite possibly in need of someshaking up. I think attention comes into this because these vibrations, if youdon't really attend to them properly, feel like an annoyance or a kind ofbeside-the-pointness -- anyone who has read a poet they can't really get intoknows what this is like. But with cultivated attention, the single voiceringing out from its little valley of poesy starts to make sound, a signalagainst the noise of living. And what we learn when we parse that signal, forourselves -- to me that is the soul of poetry.
Wow. What a generousanswer! I really like the joke buzzer image. I am reminded of O'Hara's"Personism," too, which is jokey but at the same time himself and noone else.
I want to ask you aboutlong and short poems. You have a love of the small poem; you write many; andyou've started a Sunday social media #smallpoemsunday thing for sharing poems.(It's great!) But I see you move sometimes toward the longer poem. Here's a bitfrom "Epistle to Hannah Van Binsbergen on 4%" from Light-Up Swan:
I thought I had precious little time
To write this but then Ifound a charger
...
Sorry if I'm writing like Iknow you
You have every right"to
keep violence at bay"(title poem tr. Hutchison)
And from "Rare Birdsof Massachusetts" from Reclaimed Water:
... The son
was one
of the most beautifulpeople
I had ever seen, he made mespeak
badly and break my lines
in obvious ways, on nouns
and verbs, I hated
feeling so simple
because what is morehumiliating
than to be reminded
the thing you want
most in life has only one
part, one speaking role?John
Wieners's god is like this,
his sound always gettingstolen
or taken away, like thestate
would take your child
if you nailed him to atree. ...
Both of these I've quotedfrom are in the 1st person but have plenty of asides and plenty of attention towhat's out there. How do you think about longer poems? Do you harbor anambition to write your own Paterson or Midwinter Day? What do you enjoy aboutlonger poems — both the reading and the writing of?
I love what I think Jack Underwood callssomewhere the “scopics” of poetry — the way a poem can zoom way in on thetiniest, particularest detail, or can zoom way out on the whole scale of humanexperience, history, the universe, time…and a poem can be any size while doing all that, only a few lines or a book orbeyond. I absolutely love the small poem in no small part because it’s the kindof poem most readily (& easily) held in the heart — I have a number ofsmall poems committed to memory mostly just because of repeated exposure (MollyBrodak, “How To Not Be A Perfectionist”: “People are vivid / and small / anddon’t live / very long—“), and I think that’s a really beautiful thing, thatthe littleness of the poem has caused it to become a part of me osmotically,with no special act of will or committal on my part.
On the other hand, there is somethingincredibly special about the long poem, too, which mostly for me has to do withduration. I grew up in MA (my folks are still there) and I live now in VA, soit’s not infrequently that I make the commonwealth-to-commonwealth car tripalong the East Coast, where I have ~9 hours at a time that could do with asoundtrack. I’ve needed poetry desperately for this, listening to PennSoundrecordings of John Ashbery reading “The Skaters” or Jack Spicer reading The Holy Grail or Jimmy Schuyler readingwhatever or cracking my audiobook app to listen to Ariana Reines read A Sand Book for the umpteenth time. Thelong poem, like the book of poetry more generally, invites us to sit with onevoice long enough that we act as a kind of parallax with it for making sense ofthe world — the Dr. Melfi to our Tony Soprano, the Vladimir to our Estragon,etc.
I have definitely been tempted by thelong poem, although the longest one I’ve ever actually been able to write Ithink is “A Letter From The Mountain”. There’s a little part of me thatbelieves in that thing I think Poe said, that our lyrical impulse tops out atabout half an hour of sustained possibility per sitting, even if we might tryto be amenable to the epic or the otherwise extended verse form. I’ve got somelong poems I’m quite happy with, though, and maybe there’ll be a considerablylonger one someday, so for now I will just be thankful that we are even havingthis conversation about the long poem in an era where attention feels morefissiparous than ever!
Tom, thank you again forthis conversation. I've really been enjoying it, and you've been graciouslyforthcoming. I want to ask you one last (set of) question(s), and then let yourreply close us out.
You're a teacher — highschool math, right? — and I believe you have a chapbook of poems about thatexperience. I bring this up, because one thing I notice about your poetry isthe wide scope of subject matter. Parked cop cars, classic rock on the radio, yo-yos, a neon sign, ice cream — these are afew of the things I have found your poems to be "about." I find it'sone of the things that draws me back to your poetry, the breadth of it. You doseem to be a real idiosyncratic human person experiencing an entire life andputting more of it than is usual into poetry. Can you close us out with a pairof poems, as you do with #SmallPoemSunday — one from you, one from a poet youlove, that you find notices and pays attention to a poetically unusual topic orsubject? Take us home with a couple of uncommon encounters. If you please,Maestro.
Thank you for having this conversationwith me, J-T! It’s been a pleasure, I’ve really enjoyed it :)
I was a math teacher for 7 years; now Iwork on developing math curriculum. One thing I love about math is that,ultimately, it makes sense. The cost of this making-sense is that the scope ofits reference is extremely narrow — math only looks at objects that arelogically pristinely behaved, things amenable to axioms and first-order logic.Poetry is a nice negative space for this ordered realm, I think; a place forthe chaos to play, for weird collisions to happen and stack.
I would love to close things out with acouple of small poems à la #smallpoemsunday! as it happens, I’ve drafted theNotes app poem from earlier, so for the poem from me I’ll include that:
for the poem from someone else, I’ll taketo heart your request for an unusual subject, and submit this Brandon Downing poem,a longtime favorite:
Ancient Prodigy
Don’t take off all your clothes
and tool around in your hotel
room and expect the dude
with mushrooms sprouting
across his face won’t pop out
and surprise you!
Tom Snarsky is the author of Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water,both from Ornithopter Press. His new book A Letter From The Mountain &Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025.
J-T Kelly is the author of the chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress,2023). His poetry appears in The Denver Quarterly (upcoming), BadLilies, and elsewhere. He is an innkeeper in Indianapolis.
